How Football Trashes American Culture with the Baltimore Ravens as Prime Suspects

As someone who grew up in Baltimore, though I played soccer as a kid, and so escaped the brainwashing that is American football, I thought I should watch at least a few minutes of the Super Bowl last Sunday.

I saw a few plays where the Ravens’ quarterback hit every pass, SF fumbled the ball, and the Ravens appeared to get two touchdowns in about five minutes. It seemed more like a lop-sided high-school football game. Every slightly successful play by either team triggered a disco dance among the players, like they had just discovered penicillin.

I already have dark thoughts about football as a thinly veiled exhibition by highly steroided men in extremely tight pants who can’t keep their hands off each other and whose big thrill is forming writhing daisy chains on the grass. But it’s probably not that. I mean, this is prime time American TV fueled by Bud Lite.

And should I mention tatoos? Now I know why so many people these days want big tats. They want to be football players too!

So after watching a few minutes before returning to Michael Moore’s autobiography, I catch an article in Salon.com that could spell redemption for the Ravens, and football.

Now that they’re #1, maybe they could part with a few pennies to support the shuttered Edgar Allan Poe house in Baltimore. That’s right, author of “The Raven,” whose Baltimore home is less than a mile from the stadium– as “The Raven” flies. The football team only purloined the name of maybe the best known poem in the English language, for all the threatening symbolism, mystery, and supernatural powers it infers on the players.

Come on Ravens, share the wealth. If you don’t pony up an endowment to save Baltimore’s Poe House and museum, you should change your bird name to Randy Newman’s Dirty Little Seagulls. But Randy’s still alive and might sue you.

The Ravens won the game by being bold and brave. Let’s see them be creative, and honor and preserve the legacy of their literary creator. Or perhaps some dark and dreary night suddenly there may come a tapping as if someone gently rapping, rapping on that stadium door.